Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

While putting the final touches on last week’s post, I realized I had yet to discuss The Lord of the Rings in the context of national epics and then concluded that this was an ideal time to do so. Tolkien himself was interested in national epics, both studying and creating them. During the talk “Lost Tales and Found Myths” at the Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference, Sonali Chunodkar mentioned Tolkien’s early attempt to create a national epic using the characters of Aelwine and Ing as creators of England, but he seemed to have realized this flavor of nationalism trended towards supporting colonialism and white supremacy, so he quickly dropped the idea.

The term “national epic” dates from the early 1840s when Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle spoke of “Epic Poems”. In his book Past and Present, published in 1843, he praised the Iliad by Homer as a great poem while describing the apparent downfall of English society, decrying it as a people who have “forgotten God” and “remembered only Mammon”. He also referenced the beginning of the Aeneid by Virgil, claiming the epic of England was not “Arms and the Man”, a translation of Virgil’s opening words Arma virumque, but “Tools and the Man”. To use terminology more familiar to regular readers, Carlyle believed modern people were stuck in a capitalist system created by the Industrial Revolution, which caused them to be more interested in using technology to earn money rather than to create art.

The concept of the Western European national epic is rooted in three categories: the original epics attributed to Homer and translated beginning in the 16^th century, centuries of emulating epics that directly expanded upon the story created by Homer, and the recently compiled epics created during the 19^th and early 20^th century during a surge of European nationalism.

Original Epics: Iliad & Odyssey

The overall plots of these books are familiar to the general public of the Western world. In Iliad, Greeks and Trojans go to war over a beautiful woman, while in Odyssey, a solitary survivor of this war attempts to get home to his beautiful wife but is waylaid by monsters plus additional beautiful women. When broken down to its barest essentials, characters appear to have one-track minds.

Iliad and Odyssey have been credited to Homer, supposedly a blind poet from the city-state of Ionia in Greece who lived during the 8^th century BC, but these stories began as oral histories. Like his successors, Homer probably compiled stories from a multitude of tellers and created a cohesive plot, but was unlikely to have written down the stories. Scottish minister and historian Thomas Blackwell first established the concept of a written story appearing after the death of Homer and published An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer in 1735.

This radical insight had a major effect not only on how Greek mythology was studied in the English-speaking world, but also on how future writers would view the process of creating a national epic. In addition to this new hypothesis on how these Greek epics were created, Blackwell declared that anyone who wrote such an epic must be extra special, even blessed by divine power, with such intellect that might only appear once every thousand years. Future compilers of national epics naturally wanted to prove that they were special, blessed, and a rare intellect.

Inspired by Homer: Aeneid & Franciade

The first to be inspired by Homer was the Roman poet Virgil who lived in the 1^st century BC during the time of Caesar Augustus. Virgil picked the character of Aeneas from Homer’s Iliad and wrote an unfinished poem about him, connecting a great rival to the ancient Greeks to an ancestor of Romulus and Remus, the founders of the capital city of Rome. While Virgil died of a sudden illness before the work was completed and had asked for it to be burned, the epic was instead published widely and is read in classrooms to this day. While Homer’s Greek epics were feel-good adventure stories to make Greeks proud of being Greek, the Aeneid had a narrower focus: make Augustus and his city look good. Augustus was believed to be a direct descendant of Romulus, and therefore a descendant of the hero Aeneus, proving that he was a divinely appointed ruler to an empire.

However, outside of Imperial Roman culture, this political point tends to be glossed over. Adaptions of the work remove the nationalistic overtones to create a story with mainstream appeal and focus on an element found throughout Greco-Roman mythologies: the love life of the protagonist. My personal favorite of these adaptions is Dido and Aeneas, an opera with music by Henry Purcell and libretto by Nahum Tate. The work is often dated to a premier in 1689, the year William and Mary II arrived from the Netherlands to rule England after James II of England was deposed in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, although some primary sources indicate that it may have been a few years older.

For me, the most interesting part of the opera is not its reliance solely on Book IV of Aeneid, the fact that Dido Queen of Carthage in modern Tunisia has a sister with the inexplicably English name Belinda, or how its debut was performed at an all-girls school, but that the piece uses a ground bass, also known as an ostinato. The word comes directly from Italian meaning “obstinate” and entered English as a musical term in 1876, defined as a set of notes playing in the bass part over and over again. The term is technically different from the bass part of the world’s worst wedding-march-turned-sappy-Christmas-song, “Canon in D” by Johann Pachelbel, which is known as basso continuo or figured bass. Ostinato can leave the bass line to be played by higher pitched instruments and does not need to be a chord progression, while continuo remains in the bass line and requires a chord progression. Ostinato will be featured in future songs from the hypothetical animated musical.

Many centuries later during the French Renaissance, de facto poet laureate of France Pierre de Ronsard was tasked by Charles IX to write a national epic of France, which drew inspiration from Aeneid. The project was called La Franciade, and although Ronsard was the expert in alexandrine or twelve-syllable verse at the time, he was expected to write in ten-syllable verse. Neither of these patterns matched the Greco-Roman method of dactylic hexameter, or three beats per meter and six meters in a line to make an eighteen-syllable verse. Additionally, Ronsard was required to feature a character who founded France, and he chose the baby Astyanax, also called Scamandrius, son of Hector and Andromache. In Iliad, Prince Hector of Troy killed the Greek warrior Patroclus, only to be killed by Achilles and get his body dragged around the city behind a chariot. In Aeneid, dead Hector showed up in Aeneas’ dream to tell him to get out of Troy. As for baby Astyanax, he was tossed off a wall to his death.

However, many writers did not like this ending, and I do not blame them. Among the earliest iterations of the story came from Merovingian scholars, a dynasty of the Franks who ruled from the mid-5^th to the mid-8^th centuries. They believed little Astyanax had survived, taken the name Francus, and moved to France, just like Aeneas had moved to Rome. Our friend Geoffrey of Monmouth mentioned “descendants of Hector” in his Historia Regum Britannie during the 12^th century, and since Astyanax was an only child, Geoffrey must have ascribed to the Merovingian theory. Ronsard’s use of Francus as the protagonist in Franciade was old news by the time he wrote the poem. He only managed four out of the slated twenty-four sections when Charles IX died, and brother Henry III ascended the throne without interest in Ronsard as a whole, let alone continuing the pet project. Accordingly, the poem was never near being finished.

Recent Epics: Kalevala & Ossian

I have referenced Kalevala several times as a major influence of Tolkien but never mentioned its compiler, Finnish linguist Elias Lönnrot, who lived for most of the 19^th century. After becoming a medical doctor in 1832, he skied around eastern Finland befriending Russians, Sámi, and Estonians, collecting their local stories the whole time. Lönnrot noticed similarities in the stories despite differences in language, albeit all in the Finno-Ugric language group, and decided the fragments must fit together to form a national epic for Finland. To maintain consistency, he wrote the verses into trochaic tetrameter, the beat pattern of “one and two and three and four and”. His characters included the bardic sage Wainamoinen or Väinämöinen, who sang a magical boat into being; the constellation Otava, known as the Big Dipper in English; Tuoni or Mana, ruler of the underworld; Mielikki the mother of woodlands; Nyrikki the hunter; Tapio the forest spirit; and other magical people like dwarves. Because of the similarity between Kalevala and Silmarillion, Tolkien scholar Joason Fisher compared Christopher Tolkien to Lönnrot as both created almost consistent stories from a range of fragments.

Meanwhile in Ireland, the work of Thomas Blackwell heavily influenced Seumas MacMhuirich or James Macpherson, who wanted to create his own epic based on historical Irish poetry. He published Fingal in 1761 at age twenty-five and its sequel Temora in 1763. Macpherson told the public that his poems were based on oral storytelling in Scottish Gaelic, a different language from Irish Gaelic. They supposedly told to story of the demigod Ossian. Irish people were already familiar with the father of Ossian, the mortal Finn MacCool or Fionn mac Cumhail. He was the protagonist to the Fenian cycle or Fionn Cycle, which had been a part of Irish storytelling since the 13^th century, with some stories thought to be up to 1,400 years old and dating back to the 7^th century.

However, Macpherson’s popular books were different from these original stories. Even though he was Irish, he had used Scottish stories and published them in English, the language of colonial oppressors. Scholars who knew the original stories were angry at Macpherson for passing off his new version as a direct translation of an ancient epic rather than his new invention. Among the detractors was dictionary compiler Samuel Johnson, who took out his annoyance on Scottish culture as a whole, causing Scots to about-face and side with Macpherson. Another facet to the whole debacle was jealousy. Macpherson garnered a lot of press and rode this success for two decades, ultimately becoming a Member of Parliament (MP) in 1780 and holding this seat for the rest of his life. Regardless about what one thinks of Macpherson’s academic integrity, he got exactly what he wanted out of his written work.

A National Epic for the Hobbits

When considering the in-universe origins of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, these stories share traits with other national epics. The text had been compiled and modified by multiple writers, editors, and translators, as was common for the original epics. The story used characters from the original epics — including Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron — not by revising these characters to fit a contemporary construct but making them literally immortal and not aging. The stories also show similarities to recent epics in the editors’ abilities to leverage the text to prove their political worth.

While the text connects to an original in-universe epic, The Silmarillion, which covers the history of Men, Elves, and Dwarves, most of the focus of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is on Hobbits. Bilbo and Frodo Baggins are the primary writers of the story, while Elanor Gardner Fairbairn is the original editor. Connecting these biologically unrelated people is Sam Gamgee, later Sam Gardner, who leveraged the power and political connections he had gained from his time in the Fellowship to rule the Shire for almost fifty years, transferring the seat of power from the feudal Thain of the west half of the country and Master of the eastern half of the country to the democratically elected Mayor who lived at Bag End nearer the center of the country.

Like many epic heroes, the origin of Sam was “rustic”, as put by Tolkien. The first page of dialogue in The Fellowship of the Ring introduced his entire world for the first thirty-eight years of his life: his original master Bilbo, who taught him to read, juxtaposed with his father Hamfast, who taught him to fear life, and his final master Frodo, whose adventure taught Sam to think for himself. Immediately, Sam was connected both to the perhaps divinely appointed carriers of the Ring, and to a man of the people. This foreshadowed his position as a vassal of the divinely appointed King while acting as the voice of common hobbits at the beginning of the Fourth Age.

While Sam was typically humble about his position, the dynasties formed by his children may have needed to flaunt their connection to the popular folk hero in order to maintain their political power. Naturally, a copy of the national epic from the library of the King was sent to the Great Smials of Tuckborough, where Sam’s great-grandson ruled as Thain no doubt alongside a second cousin elected Mayor and another second cousin ruling over the Westmarch. With the popularity of consolidating power within the Shire, another of Sam’s descendants might have become the Master or his wife. A national epic was just what the clan needed to explain this sudden yet peaceful transition of power.

Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical